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    ‘The Seven Faces of Jane’ Review: One Movie, Eight Directors

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    Gillian Jacobs’s blank slate protagonist floats through a series of encounters in this feature-length movie made up of short films.A director’s career is often measured by the quality and quantity of their feature films. But short films can offer a chance to experiment with styles and subjects that might not be suited for a wider commercial release. “The Seven Faces of Jane” combines these two modes of production to create an omnibus film; it’s a feature-length movie comprising short films made by emerging directors.At the center of each short story is Jane (played by Gillian Jacobs, who also directs the first of the movie’s shorts), a single mother who opens the movie by dropping off her daughter at summer camp in Malibu. The film’s episodic story follows Jane as she floats through a series of encounters during her week of solitude in Southern California. She begins with a surreal trip to a roadside diner, but her journeys take her to the desert, the beach and the mountains. She connects with strangers, as well as lovers, including a former flame played by Joel McHale, who starred on the TV series “Community” with Jacobs.Jane is a bit of a blank slate as a protagonist, and her flatness feels jarring when she encounters other characters with more depth. One episode introduces Tayo (Chido Nwokocha), an ex of Jane’s who describes feeling alienated from his Blackness and sense of self during their relationship. Another sequence finds Jane teaching the steps of a waltz to a teenager dreading the dances at her quinceañera. Jane acts as a sounding board when these characters describe their feelings about their specific cultures. Yet in her responses, she remains as two-dimensional as a sketch on white paper.The directors — Jacobs, Gia Coppola, Boma Iluma, Ryan Heffington, Xan Cassavetes, Julian J. Acosta, Ken Jeong (another of Jacobs’s “Community” castmates) and Alex Takacs — come from a wide range of creative and personal backgrounds. But the shorts blend together without significant variation. The transitions eschew title cards, subtly eliding shifts by returning to images of Jane in her car.There is continuity in this makeshift road picture‌ — Jane’s costumes and makeup remain cohesive across the shorts, and the film’s segments keep the same cool color palette. But the consistency limits the ability of the directors to lean into their own style, leading to a movie that feels narratively scattered and stylistically inhibited.The Seven Faces of JaneNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Plan A’ Review: Seeking Vengeance for the Holocaust

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      Set in postwar Germany, this film dramatizes the true story of a group of Jewish survivors who sought revenge through an astonishing undercover operation.Movies about the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust often focus on the long journey to begin life anew, but “Plan A” dramatizes attempts by some survivors first to seek retribution — on a huge scale. The directors, Doron and Yoav Paz, fashion an undercover thriller from the true story of some 50 Jewish vigilantes called the Avengers who tried to poison millions in German cities.Max (August Diehl) returns to Germany in 1945 to search for his family and finds antisemitism still widespread. He meets a Jewish brigade of the British Army that is secretly targeting war criminals for off-the-books executions. They’re efficient — cue a montage sequence of Nazis being shot in the head — and Max helps them until he learns of the Avengers, or Nakam, which means revenge in Hebrew.Max joins their mission to infiltrate a water plant, while their leader smuggles toxic substances from abroad. The scale and ambition of the plan can’t fail to create some suspense, even as it falls apart. But the storytelling is surprisingly slack, while it grasps for anguished romantic tension between Max and another plotter (Sylvia Hoeks). Diehl moves from looking stricken to single-minded but doesn’t bring much weight, moral or otherwise, to his pivotal protagonist.An opening voice-over asks what you would do if your entire family were murdered. Despite sounding like a preview trailer’s hook, the blunt question emotionally situates us in the Nazi hellscape more effectively than the film’s visuals of ruins and hide-outs. The rest of “Plan A” never quite rises to the challenge posed by this remarkable chapter in history.Plan ANot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Flux Gourmet’ Review: Mastering the Art of Fringe Cooking

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      Peter Strickland’s latest film is a speculative comedy about art, desire and gastrointestinal discomfort.What if the primary sensory goal of cooking were to stimulate the ears? What if you experienced a movie through your nostrils and taste buds, or felt it in your gut? These bizarre, intriguing questions are part of the foundation, the spine — the sofrito — of “Flux Gourmet,” the fifth feature by the British writer-director Peter Strickland.The first, “Katalin Varga” (2009) was a revenge drama set in Transylvania. Since then, Strickland has departed both from genre conventions and from known geography, conjuring parallel realities organized around particular aesthetic and erotic obsessions: Italian horror and sound design in “Berberian Sound Studio” (2013); entomology and B.D.S.M. in “The Duke of Burgundy” (2015); high fashion and Italian horror again in “In Fabric” (2019); and now cuisine.Not the kind you eat — though there are some awkward dinner gatherings and episodes of surreptitious snacking. Food, in the world of this film, is the music of love. Culinary sound collectives are the equivalent of rock bands, building walls of expressive noise from the whine of blenders and the sizzle of vegetables dropped in hot oil.One such group, which can’t agree on a name, has been granted a residence at an “institute devoted to culinary and alimentary performance” in a converted rural manor house. One narrative thread follows the simmering tensions between Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), who is in charge of the place, and Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed, a Strickland stalwart), the visionary, vegetarian leader of the troupe. Elle adamantly rejects the slightest hint of constructive criticism from Jan, who believes that her largess entitles her to be heard.This tension exacerbates the rivalry within the group. Elle may be the leader, but her bandmates, a floppy-haired emo kid (Asa Butterfield) and an angular avant-gardist (Ariane Labed) have nascent creative agendas of their own. There’s also an element of sexual intrigue, as often happens when aesthetic passions are inflamed. Meanwhile, a rejected band of culinary artists lurks in the shadows, threatening violence.All of this is chronicled — mostly in Greek voice-over with English subtitles — by a saturnine fellow named Stones (Makis Papadimitriou) who works as the institute’s “dossierge.” A writer by trade and a wallflower by temperament, he observes Elle and her colleagues, filming their meetings and performances, interviewing them together and taking notes on their squabbles.The poor man has troubles of his own. Digestive troubles, to be precise, which disrupt his sleep and sour his already gloomy mood. The resident doctor (Richard Bremmer) is a pompous boor, and Stones spends a lot of his time in the lavatory, the rest of it wearing the unmistakable grimace of a man holding back considerable gas.There is obvious comic potential in his predicament, but Strickland doesn’t exploit it in the obvious ways. This isn’t “Blazing Saddles”; audible flatulence is restricted to a single plaintive note, rather than a full symphony. But the unheard music of Stone’s lower intestinal tract is nonetheless a key structural element, organizing “Flux Gourmet” into an elegant fugue of contrapuntal themes: grossness and refinement; pleasure and disgust; appetite and discipline.The film isn’t so much an allegory or fantasy as a witty philosophical speculation on some elemental human issues. We are animals driven by lust, hunger and aggression, but also delicate creatures in love with beauty and abstraction. Those two sides of our nature collide in unexpected, infinitely variable ways.“Flux Gourmet” is Strickland’s funniest film to date, with more outright jokes than its predecessors, and a few sublime visual gags, many of them involving Jan’s outfits (they were designed by Giles Deacon, with hats by Steven Jones). It’s like a Restoration comedy run through a John Waters filter and sprinkled with Luis Buñuel itching powder.Maybe such comparisons are unfair. Certainly Elle insists on the absolute integrity and originality of her work, and even as “Flux Gourmet” mocks her self-seriousness it also defends her dignity. Mohamed, fully committed to the bit, allows you to believe that Elle is both a courageous genius and a complete nut. I’m inclined to think Strickland is more of the former than the latter. I’ve never encountered a flavor palette quite like the one he assembles here, and while this movie isn’t always easy to digest, it’s a taste very much worth acquiring.Flux GourmetNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Zero Contact’ Review: A Token of the Times

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      Rick Dugdale’s thriller, shot over Zoom early in the pandemic, stars Anthony Hopkins as an eccentric tech genius. It was previously released as an NFT.It seems that innovation is everything to the director Rick Dugdale. In May 2020, while many people were still learning to bake sourdough, Dugdale began to shoot the techno-thriller “Zero Contact” over Zoom. Last year, the director released the movie, a modestly amusing flick, as a nonfungible token, or NFT. “Zero Contact” stars Anthony Hopkins as Finley Hart, an enigmatic engineer and genius whose death is reported in the opening credits. Hart leaves behind hours of recorded video logs filled with twisty, seemingly half-improvised monologues, which give the impression that his tongue can’t keep up with his brain.While Hart was alive, he spent decades developing teleportation technology. Bad things will happen if the machine he left behind implodes. The conceit is to make this familiar ticking-time-bomb plot take place on computer screens. An unseen spy watches Hart’s estranged son (Chris Brochu) and feisty former employees panic during an emergency virtual meeting, and taps into their cellphone and security cameras. Every few seconds, the image glitches, apparently for added realism.Hopkins’s character is a routine riff on the aloof tycoon. “I lost touch with my humanity,” he quips, “boohoo.”There’s a vicarious pleasure to be found in watching Hopkins, the octogenarian actor, getting the hang of technology that allows him to film himself without the usual hovering crew. Indeed, the behind-the-scenes footage that plays over the movie’s end credits is as engaging as its plot. “Who’s that on the left?” Hopkins asks, pointing at a corner of his video-call frame. Told that it’s the screenwriter Cam Cannon, Hopkins beams. “Hey, I’m sorry,” he says, “I hope I didn’t take too much liberty with your writing!”Zero ContactRated R for a grisly moment of violence. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Exorcism of God’ Review: Devilishly Demeaning

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      In this regressive tale of demons and damsels, a priest must admit his sins before he can vanquish a malevolent spirit.“The Exorcism of God” opens with the possession of Magali (Irán Castillo), a nun at an orphanage in Mexico whose nipples get at least as much on-screen attention as her face. As soon as Magali and Father Peter Williams (Will Beinbrink), the priest performing her exorcism, are left alone, he rapes her. Such is the nature of this soulless film, directed by Alejandro Hidalgo and written by Hidalgo and Santiago Fernández Calvete.Eighteen years after that exorcism, Peter, still a clergyman, lives in a village where the residents believe he is a saint. When children start dying from what appears to be an incurable illness, he worries it is “a punishment from the Lord.” Indeed it’s a demon — the same one who possessed Magali has reappeared at a nearby women’s prison. Peter calls upon his colleague, Father Michael Lewis (Joseph Marcell) to help him defeat it once and for all.There’s just one hiccup: Peter, who dodged excommunication by never telling his bishop about the whole raping-a-sister thing, can’t vanquish the spirit unless he comes clean. A smarter film might take this opportunity to dissect its corrupt leading man. “The Exorcism of God” does not. Instead it makes Peter an antihero — mainly by throwing a lot of imperiled women and children into his path to save.At one point, Michael explains the concept of an “auteur exorcism” to Peter, insisting that in order to really outsmart a demon, one must not believe in God — he must believe he is God. It feels like a subconscious confession from Hidalgo, who must think quite highly of his own directorial chops to create such misogynistic nonsense in the first place.The Exorcism of GodRated R for rape, carnage and carnal women. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Nightride’ Review: One Last Job

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      The movie is indebted to neon-lit crime thrillers set behind the wheel of an outlaw’s automobile, but it fails to deliver the goods.Stephen Fingleton’s “Nightride” is indebted to a rich tradition of nocturnal, neon-lit crime thrillers set behind the wheel of an outlaw’s automobile, beginning with Walter Hill’s 1978 classic “The Driver” and continuing through Michael Mann’s 1981 heist flick “Thief” and Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 throwback “Drive.”As if to make these connections even clearer, in an early scene a drug-dealing Ph.D. candidate called Scholar (Ciaran Flynn) is speaking to his supplier, Budge (Moe Dunford), and holding forth on the brilliance of Mann, who also directed the 2006 film “Miami Vice.” Scholar believes that “Miami Vice” is “the apex of Mann’s post-celluloid filmography.” But the Mann picture that “Nightride” most resembles is probably “Collateral,” which similarly concerns an all-night criminal odyssey and takes place primarily inside a car. Had Fingleton included a hacker as a character, we could have had a bit of “Blackhat,” too.The plot of “Nightride” is little more than an assembly of stock types: the crook trying to go clean (Dunford), the loan shark feared for his vicious reprisals (Stephen Rea), the well-meaning girlfriend who becomes endangered when the big score goes wrong (Joana Ribeiro). Its distinguishing feature is that the action unfolds in real time, in one (seemingly) continuous 90-minute take, as Budge, the drug-runner played by Dunford, cruises around Belfast trying to pull off one last job.The one-take gimmick — much easier to achieve now thanks to digital cameras —has become common enough that it barely qualifies as novel, having been used in “Birdman,” “Victoria,” and “1917,” among many others. As in those movies, there is a kind of “Look, Ma, no hands!” bluster to this technique that smacks of needlessly showing off, calling attention to the aptitude of the filmmaker at the expense of the characters and the story. It’s worth noting that while Mann’s crime films are aesthetically sumptuous, the images are always in service of the ideas — not the other way around.NightrideNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Hell Is Empty’ Review: Sins of the Father

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      In this bare-bones horror film, a young woman joins a cult and eventually defies its patriarch.In horror, the burden of taking down the patriarchy — whether symbolized by a group of violent men or just one foreboding male monster — often rests on the humble shoulders of a young woman. “Hell Is Empty,” a film by the director Jo Shaffer about a girl who haplessly joins and eventually dismantles a remote cult, follows this tradition. Unfortunately, its heroine is just one in a series of underwritten characters.The film centers on Lydia (Spencer Peppet), a redheaded runaway who is found, unconscious, in the wilderness and brought to the cult compound by its leader, Ed (Travis Mitchell). Lydia joins four other women in a rickety island shack overseen by Ed, who the followers also call Artist, for his prolific paintings of biblical scenes and the apocalypse. One noticeably pregnant follower, Saratoga (Nia Farrell), claims to be a virgin expecting the son of God. Lydia sees no red flags here and happily stays, eventually fighting back against Ed — and two of the other women — only after things get murderous.Forget about hell, the emptiness these filmmakers must address lies primarily in their predominantly female cast of characters. We don’t know where Lydia comes from, nor why it would be a worse place to return to than a cult led by a rapist. There is no plot justification for Lydia’s bizarre acceptance, just as there is little background for anything else in the script, co-written by Shaffer and Adam DeSantes.One of Ed’s followers, Murphy (Aya), stumbles from scene to scene, hunched over and completely mute. An oblivious crony to Ed, she presents a particularly galling caricature of developmental disability, one that is painful to watch in 2022. The movie’s press notes explain that Murphy grew up alone and feral in the forest, but there is no mention of this in the film itself — an apt example of how “Hell Is Empty” renders all its players with aggravating shallowness.Hell Is EmptyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Tiger Rising’ Review: A Cage of Clichés

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      A lonely boy finds an ally when he discovers a caged tiger in a forest behind his home, but imagination is somehow short-lived in this children’s movie.In the children’s drama “The Tiger Rising,” a lonely boy whose mother recently died finds a spiritual ally when he discovers a caged tiger in a forest behind his home in rural Florida.Rob (Christian Convery) is a shy 12-year-old whose skin disorder has made him a target for his classmates. They call him, in an example of the movie’s flavorless affectations, Disease Boy.Rob stumbles upon the tiger when he wanders the woods alone, but the quiet boy is an unlikely companion for such a wild creature. It’s only when he befriends a spirited new student named Sistine (Madalen Mills) that Rob’s imagination is given room to grow.Loneliness bonds the two outcasts, and together, they find an outlet for their frustrations by visiting the tiger. They want to set the animal free, even if it’s against the advice of the one adult Rob and Sistine trust, Willie May (Queen Latifah), a maid whom the children think of as a prophet.The director and screenwriter, Ray Giarratana, mixes elements of whimsy and childhood longing into “The Tiger Rising,” based on the book by Kate DiCamillo, with drawings that come to life and vivid dreams of tigers running wild. The fantasy sequences provide the film with momentary zings of energy. But imagination is short-lived, as the movie seems to wring every drop of sentiment from its scenes of lonesome dreamers.Here, children are angels who overcome demons, Black women are endowed with otherworldly wisdom, and tigers are symbols of spiritual emancipation. The metaphors are so obvious that the film becomes trapped in its own cage of archetypes and clichés, and unlike the tiger, there is no champion to open the gates to a more original cinematic world.The Tiger RisingRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘A Cops and Robbers Story’ Review: Keep Your Enemies Closer

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      This documentary follows a police officer who rose through the ranks while concealing his criminal past.Corey Pegues, the subject of the slim and sober documentary “A Cops and Robbers Story,” started in law enforcement in 1992, eventually becoming a commanding officer in his 20-year career with the New York City Police Department. But as a Black officer, Pegues was often treated with suspicion by his fellow policemen, who would snidely comment that he was too close to the community he was patrolling.What these officers didn’t know was that Pegues had once been part of a drug gang in Queens known as the Supreme Team. When he trained new officers, his presentations included criminal data on his own friends and former associates. Pegues was, in effect, living a double life.Pegues’s story is told through photographs, home videos and, most significantly, through present-day interviews with him, his family, friends and former contacts in both the police department and among members of the Supreme Team. The director, Ilinca Calugareanu, also includes re-enactments to stage the dramatic episodes from Pegues’s life, such as his failed attempt to shoot and kill a man.The re-enactments are attractively filmed, with stark cinematography and colorful costume choices. But their inclusion disrupts the flow of the narrative, often looping back to demonstrate scenes that have already been explained.The repetition of verbal and visual storytelling points to the limited scope of this film. “A Cops and Robbers Story” explores Pegues’s split loyalties, but the talking head interviews tend to isolate characters whose very intimacy is the subject of the film. If the central problem of Pegues’s life was that his past and present could never interact, the documentary replicates rather than resolves this tension.A Cops and Robbers StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More